


Prometheus: Bleedout

by SociopathicArchangel



Series: 25 Lives [2]
Category: Don't Hug Me I'm Scared (Short Film)
Genre: 25 lives AU, F/M, for the sake of backup
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-23
Updated: 2015-04-23
Packaged: 2018-03-25 02:40:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,855
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3793624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SociopathicArchangel/pseuds/SociopathicArchangel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is something interesting about a heart that is taken apart and put back together. Some parts <br/>are old, some parts don’t fit and some parts are entirely new. </p>
<p>Some parts are hidden deep.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Prometheus: Bleedout

 

She is twenty four when the fog that she didn’t even know was obscuring her vision lifts. Her eyes lock with apple green irises and suddenly she realizes that she’s been seeing the world through a blurry television screen, image muddled with pixels and going too unfocused for her to discern whether she’s awake or dreaming.

 

Everything clicks and she’s assaulted by a wave of colors. Her world is suddenly in HD.

 

She is twenty four when she realizes that she is her, she is alive and she is aware of things about herself she didn’t even notice before.

 

* * *

 

 

“Thanks, Harry.”

 

He freezes. Her eyes go wide.

 

The man turns to her, bug-eyed. An image of those eyes, looking at her like that, fear intensified thousandfold and blood all of the place, flickers in her mind. She closes her eyes, an annoying wave of dizziness passing over her.

 

“H-how do you know my name?”

 

Her eyebrows rise, “What?”

 

“My name is Harry.”

 

“Oh,” she says, tapping a finger to her chin. It just…felt right? How were you supposed to explain something like that? “I don’t know.”

 

Harry nods to himself and swallows, “Lucky guess, maybe?”

 

She hums. They both know that’s not the answer but she nods back anyway.

 

* * *

 

 

Her mind is still a boring drone though. She can’t trace events together and experiences feel numb except for a select few that’s she’s had lately. It’s like taking a walk with no destination in mind, just walking until you notice you’re way past where you wanted to go.

 

Speaking of destinations, she’s late for work and the traffic isn’t helping. The crowd is thick, the line of cars thicker and the summer air has a grudge against humanity, possibly for global warming.

 

Someone bumps into her shoulder and almost sends her into the busy road. She grits her teeth and turns to them, “Watch it.”

The man is tall. Dark blue skin, black hair sticking up, frosted with gold and he looks just as annoyed as she is. He checks his watch first before turning to her, “I’m sorry?”

 

“I said, watch where you’re going, prick,” she snapped, clicking the ‘k’ and letting her head bob at the last word. The man’s eyes grow wide, like he’s surprised somebody actually talked back to him.

 

“You’re not the only one in the road.”

 

“I can see that,” he said, “Though some of them are a little vertically challenged and it’s hard seeing them from up here.”

 

She hisses, “Must be because you’re so up your high horse that the altitude’s caused your head to blow out of proportion.”

 

He raises an eyebrow.

 

The light reds and the cars stop. They stop insulting each other enough for them to cross the street where he bumps into her again.

 

She whirls around and kicks his shin, “You’re doing that on purpose, aren’t you? Get some glasses.”

 

“Might be useful to get some heels, love,” he rubs at his sore knee, “People might mistake you for a midget. Oh, wait.”

 

“Oh, no,” she scoffs, “You don’t get to call me love, dear. Not until you get manners,” she steps close to him, pulls out the pencil from her hair and jams it into his forearm. He takes a step back with a curse. “They’re useful for society,” she says, turns around and walks away.

 

She doesn’t notice that her memory and ability to appreciate events go clearer after that.

 

* * *

 

Her senior, Harry has two roommates.

 

It turns out that he – meaning giant asshole with the ego the size of the sun and he should definitely be chucked there to burn – was Robin’s coworker.

 

And was in the need of finding a flat.

 

Just like her.

 

Damn.

 

It.

 

* * *

 

And then, because the universe hates her (no she is not getting attached to him what are you talking about), the housemate thing goes on for years.

 

* * *

 

 

Tony slips and then everything is over.

It’s not metaphorical. His body literally hits the carpet and makes a loud thud that has every head in the house snapping to the direction where it’s coming from and everybody bolting upstairs. Paige kicks the door of Tony’s room down with one blow.

 

He’s on the floor, on his side and almost curled up in the fetal position, most likely out of reflex. There’s a small cut on his cheek and a bigger one at the side of his forehead, bleeding. They help him sit up and he coughs weakly.

 

“What happened?” Paige asks.

 

Tony tries to talk but he doesn’t get the first syllable out when he’s interrupted by a harsher cough from his own throat.

 

“Tony,” that’s Manny’s voice. He’s holding Tony’s right arm, the one he landed on when he fell, and lifting the sleeve.

 

He looks like a Dalmatian. A morbid version of it. Multiple purplish spots and bruises dot his skin and there’s one wound that’s bleeding, staining the sleeve and alerting Manny in the first place.

 

Why do his hands look bony all of a sudden?

 

Robin’s eyes go wide and he mutters a “Shit,” under his breath before lifting Tony’s shirt, earning a protest, and seeing the huge angry mark on his side.

 

He presses his lips to a thin line.

 

Paige turns back to Tony and snaps, “What happened?”

 

“My knee suddenly buckled,” he said, woozy, “I think I hit my head on the desk.”

 

“Fuck,” Robin runs a hand through his hair. His eyes flicker from Paige to Tony and he exhales through his nose. Paige doesn’t need any other confirmation that everything’s about to go downhill from here.

 

“Harry, get the car,” he says.

 

The older man frowns, “Robin?”

 

“Just get the car, damn it!”

 

Harry stares down Robin for a moment before giving up and doing as he was told. Manny takes Tony’s legs while Robin loops his arms under Tony’s and they heave him out the room.

 

“What is going on?!” Paige asks as she follows them. Tony’s eyes are glazed over and they look like they’re going to be rolling to the back of his head soon.

 

“Tony, how long have you been sick?” Robin ignores her.

 

There’s a sleepy grunt before the man question answers, “How’d you know that?”

 

“Prescription slip in the trash bin. Now, how long?”

 

“About…three days.”

 

They make their way out the front door where Harry’s waiting. Paige slips into the backseat to receive Tony’s head while Robin switches with Manny to take his legs, then Manny gets to the passenger seat. Once the door slams shut, Robin tells Harry to floor the gas. Hospital. Right now.

 

“What the hell is wrong with him?!” Paige yells. Robin glances at her but doesn’t say anything. He keeps his mouth shut for the rest of the ride.

 

It turns out the doctors weren’t any better because they kept on yammering about x-rays and bloodwork and biopsies and what the hell, they came here to know what was wrong with Tony not to listen to their speech.

 

Basically, they ran tests, but nothing they can confirm yet.

 

Tony’s able to get back home, though nobody’s making him do chores. They’re all fluttering around like worried hens and even leaving Paige alone to do what she wishes. As far as Paige knows, she was an ass and they didn’t really like her, for good reason. So was Tony. They have no reason to do this.

 

Downhill alright.

 

Harry makes Tony call in sick. In fact, he makes the phone call himself and forces Tony to stay in bed, or else he was going to make him eat chicken soup or some other awful food all day. That’s enough of a threat. The man can hardly stand oatmeal.

 

Of course, when they come back, he’s walking around the house making dinner for himself because he didn’t want the food in the fridge. The grin is strained, Paige is familiar enough with his mannerisms to notice that. He’s not running on fuel, he’s scraping the last, hardened remnants of his strength to show that he was fine.

 

Harry looks furious, but doesn’t say anything.

 

Tony easily exchanges banter with Paige the whole evening and for a while she can pretend that he doesn’t look like he’s about to keel over any moment now. Still, no chores, no staying up late, both of them, much to her confusion, up to their rooms and in bed. Paige clenches her fist and grits her teeth because she’s not a kid, she’s past thirty. She’s not going to do that no matter how many times Robin says, “Go directly to bed. Do not pass go. Do not take BS from Tony.”

 

But then Manny pulls that puppy-dog look on her that’s never really worked before, but this time she knows there’s something there. Something that said that there was something very, very, very wrong.

 

So she huffs and goes to her room, but she doesn’t sleep early. She’s pretty sure that only applied to Tony.

 

Instead she thinks. Thinks about the bruises dotting his body; thinks about his limbs were shaking and how he winced when his elbow accidentally hit the counter, however softly; thinks about how long it would be until he finally caved in that he was hurting instead of trying to draw from his reserves that aren’t there anymore.

 

She wakes up early and finds Robin in the kitchen.

 

“Is he okay?”

 

The man stiffens and turns to her.

 

There was always something at the back of his eyes. Something she can’t quite place. Something that makes her think about blood and unholy laughter.

 

That’s what she’s seeing right now.

 

Then the expression relaxes before it falls down to pained. He looks away.

 

They get to work as usual. The car ride is silent and awkward, everyone isn’t looking at each other and Harry doesn’t look like he’s blinking until they get to the building. Paige does her job, it gets her mind off of things even if some people got on her nerves, and then meets her housemates when they are dismissed.

 

The car ride back was _suffocating_. She could choke on the tension faster than a garrote.

 

Robin’s face was grim and brooding, Harry looked weary and Manny’s eyes were a little wet. All of them were avoiding looking at her.

 

Once the car stops, she doesn’t let them out the door.

 

“Somebody tell me what is happening.”

 

Harry moves to get out. She slams a hand on the back of his seat and he stops, “Don’t even try it, Harry.”

 

He flinches at that, eyes widening for a bit (fear, fear, sweet fear what on earth) before he retracts his hand from the lock. He swallows, “What makes you think something is happening?”

 

She grinds her teeth together and glares at him, “You aren’t very good actors.”

 

Robin scoffs. Her attention snaps to him as he runs a hand over his face and schools his expression.

 

Then he glares at her.

 

The nerve –

 

“You really wanna know?”

 

Manny turns to him, “Robin.”

 

“You want to know, Paige?” he snaps again. She nods. He waits a beat, “The results came.”

 

“And?”

 

“And Tony’s at the hospital right now.”

 

Paige nearly stands before she remembers the car’s low ceiling, “When did you have time to – ”

 

“They called in the middle of work, we told them it was an emergency,” Harry says, “I’ve been working there long enough to be excused.”

 

“So why are we at the house?!”

 

“Because this isn’t something you’re supposed to be involved with.”

 

Fuck. That.

Looks like she said that out loud with equal intensity because the atmosphere thickens even further.

 

She turns to Robin.

 

He sighs heavily and looks down for a moment before dragging his eyes up and meeting hers.

 

“Tony’s got leukemia.”

 

…

 

…

 

…

 

Shit.

 

Forget downhill, the car just dipped into a nosedive off a hundred-meter steep cliff.

 

* * *

 

 

Despite work, they manage to poke holes into their schedules for Tony’s visits to the hospital. Harry even shares the car and lets her drive it when it’s her turn. They all work themselves off to pay for the bills, rent, food, fuel and other needs. Tony’s comfort and cure is top priority at the moment. They swear off coffee, but not without a good round of bitching about it for the first few days from all of them. They rarely give themselves indulgences and focus on Tony. If Tony wants pizza, they’re getting him pizza. He’s being treated like a prince.

 

Tony doesn’t want to be a sick prince, though, that she knows. He likes being feared and loved, not treated like he’s going to break any time and their babying is annoying him. That ends up with a shouting match, her included, because damn it, Tony, we’re trying to keep you alive, and then his limbs betray him and he’s forced to lie back in bed again.

 

See, that’s another thing that has her confused. They look at her like she’s a ticking time bomb most of the time; they eye the pencils or whatever sharp thing that’s near her like she’s going to stab them, avoid her when they can, and they argue when they do speak. Tony is an arrogant git they can’t stand either. Half the time, one of them looks ready to bash his face in, when they’re not acting scared.

 

If anything, they should be a bit concerned, not acting like their mission in life was to keep Tony alive.

 

Was that what people did? Was this some sort of ‘love your enemy’ episode? Her housemates are so weird but they’re righteously weird that they’re not going to let someone they hate die, so she can roll with it. They help each other out and the arguments dwindle to nothing, all of them set on getting Tony back in shape again, even if it meant missing work to drive him for a session at the hospital.

 

Chemotherapy is a bitch.

 

Watching Tony get injected with something into his spine made her want to rip out the doctors’ throats and scream that they were hurting him (no one except me). It left Tony feeling like shit too. Sometimes she doesn’t want it to be her turn to take him to the hospital if she was going to have to face that. But then that would mean she was the worst out of all of them.

 

Tony, who, despite all their arguments and violent approaches, understood her the best. Was friends with her, if they went by society’s standards. Made her mind a lot clearer and lifted her up from being submerged into a pool she hadn’t realized she was put in.

 

And she would even think about leaving? When the ones who hated him – hated them – were trying their best like Tony was the universe’s lifeline and needed to live or everyone would die?

 

So she stays and watches as he grits his teeth every session and lies still on his back after.

 

Still, it doesn’t get any easier when leukemia’s draining his immune system to a shriveled vegetable and chemo looks like it’s betraying them the longer it gets. She wants them to stop, and would have jammed the syringe into the doctor’s head if not for Manny holding her back and explaining how it worked.

 

But then leukemia’s not giving up easily either, and they have to switch. Chemo starts being acid to the blood.

 

Even Robin’s giving lip and he never complained about the therapy, just checked on Tony and made sure he wasn’t going to drop.

 

Still, when Paige lunges at the doctor, he grabs her arm just in time and drags her outside. It’s the first time he’s ever raised a hand against her and she’s thankful, because he’s almost breaking her arm. It’s inhuman.

 

They go out of the hospital and don’t stop until they’re several blocks away from it. Then Robin lets her go and she rubs at her reddening wrist.

 

She hisses before he can get a word out, “Don’t tell me to calm the fuck down, you hypocrite.”

 

He presses his lips to thin line and exhales through his nose, “I’m not going to. But I am telling you to stop trying to kill the people who might be the only ones who can save Tony.”

 

“Save him?” she scoffs, “They’re killing him.” Her voice doesn’t make it to the last syllable without cracking, so she lowers it to a whisper. She chews the inside of her cheek. No, no, don’t think about that. He’s going to be fine. Don’t you dare cry.

 

She schools her expression and glares at him, “It’s like they do this shit for kicks to rake in more cash.”

 

“Paige,” Robin runs a hand through his hair. Why doesn’t he just rip it all out? “There are cancer cells swimming around the fluid around his spine and brain. Nobody does aggressive treatment for kicks.”

 

“Get him another diagnosis!”

 

“That’s not something that can be done!”

 

She snarls, “Something must have gone wrong. They must have slipped up and the results came back like that. And if that’s the case, that poison to the blood is going to kill him.”

 

“Paige – ”

“No! Fuck no! Shut up! He’s already got fucking anemia, Robin, don’t fucking tell me that he needs to have his cerebrospinal fluid pumped with acid,” Paige turns away, teeth still bared and glaring at the road.

Robin shuts his mouth and turns to the road as well. The passing cars that have seen their fight have mostly slowed down to watch the free soap opera. That almost gets a laugh out of Paige. Her life was an asinine soap opera. The people who are watching can politely _fuck off_ because she doesn’t want to deal with them unless they voluntarily want to have their throats ripped out and their spines and skulls used for crocket.

 

At least soap operas had good endings.

 

“Is it going to hurt?”

 

Robin glances at her from the corner of his eye.

 

“Yes.”

 

“Fuck.”

 

* * *

 

 

The first thing she thinks after the first round is that it wasn’t so bad, but also knows in the back of her head that she’s going to eat her words very soon. Tony looks comatose in his drug-induced sleep and she almost wishes he could stay like that. No, even better, that she was the one sleeping and when she woke up it was all going to be a nightmare that she could shove in the back burner and get on with her life. No cancer. No chemotherapy.

 

No dying Tony.

 

She’s being a pessimist, she realizes. But every time she looks at him, asleep after another injection to the spine, there’s a voice in the back of her head that sneers, “He’s going to die and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.”

 

On her way home from work (Harry’s looking after Tony this time), she passes by a church. People are crowding the gates, unable to fit inside the building itself, heads bowed and hands folded as they murmur prayers. She wonders what the event is that would gather that much people.

 

_Ever thought of praying?_

If her brain was a physical entity that was separate from her so that she could see it, she would chortle and jeer at it for its stupidity at the moment. Praying? To who? The man in the sky? If there was a man in the sky, then he wouldn’t let her life suck so much. He wouldn’t let Tony have cancer and let him suffer through all of the unnecessary pain.

 

“If you’re really out there, just save him,” she grits through her teeth.

 

There’s no fanfare. No light from the sky or clouds parting with an angel coming down and declaring in a booming voice, “Be not afraid.”

 

There’s just wind hitting her face and slapping hard reality on her. She curls her lip and walks ahead, fast paced.

 

* * *

Tony’s shivering and his dark blue skin is almost an ashy blue. He coughs until he’s puking and even after, his face is twisted up in pain. Just when Paige thinks he’s finished emptying up the day’s worth of meals, he throws up into the waste bin again, scraping whatever is left of his food intake from last week. Sometimes it’s a dark green or brown.

 

The days pass by with the routine back and forth from the hospital and the house, the boys are working their best to pay for their living and Tony’s medication, and on one instance, Robin had to hack bank accounts. Not that she feels guilty. Tony’s a lot more important than wads of currency.

 

She sits with him on the times that he’s awake and not practicing how to lie in his coffin (her brain can go throw itself into a ditch and die, she thinks she can live without the sadistic abomination) and they exchange insults, and for a moment she can pretend that everything’s normal and Tony just caught the flu.

 

That’s one hell of a flu then, because he doesn’t look like he can fully open his eyes, he’s almost constantly shaking and is pale as death. His hair is falling out, and since he was such a vain bastard, he either stayed under the covers most of the time or wore a beanie, sometimes beret.

 

She snorts. Even in the face of death, he still thinks too highly of his appearance.

 

There’s offers for counseling and all of them say fuck that. Tony doesn’t need being told that he’s going to die and she sure as hell doesn’t need to be told that he’s not going to survive and here are guidelines on how to get over it. Her own mind tormenting her is enough, thank you.

 

Paige doesn’t want counseling, she doesn’t want ‘promising’, she doesn’t want them slowing down the cancer. She wants them to take it by the spine and rip it out of its body, crush its head open and scrape its brains out to feed it to the sharks. She wants to crush it under her foot and burn it to ground.

 

She doesn’t want Tony to die.

 

That’s the issue at light. When they first lived under the same roof, she has more than once sent him to the sick bed by breaking his arm, leg, hip; slipping drugs into his coffee, stabbed him, maimed him, burnt him and the list goes on under the huge headline of ‘Trying to Kill Tony’. The bastard’s done the same to her.

 

She doesn’t want Tony to die, and heaven help her now because she doesn’t need more confusion with her thoughts.

 

The truth is, she doesn’t want him to leave her, dead or alive.

 

Paige doesn’t want Tony to die.

 

She concludes:

 

Paige does not want to be alone.

 

* * *

 

“How do you even get to work on time without me?”

 

Paige snorts, “Right, like I need you around for me to get on with my life.”

 

Tony hums. His face is squished from having one cheek pressed on the pillow as he lies on his stomach so the sound is a little broken.

 

He looks so pale, especially with the dark lines under his eyes.

 

“Let’s see, you don’t have a consistent schedule for waking up, your body clock is nonexistent, you would be late for work if I wasn’t in the house, and you don’t follow the allotted number of time for baking or frying things. You could set a house on fire, get kicked out of your job, die in your sleep. Need I go on?”

 

“No, but you can work on dumbing down your ego in case I need to grab an anchor to make sure your head doesn’t float you out the earth.”

 

Tony grunts and she chuckles.

 

Her vision is assaulted with white and there’s a high-pitched whining noise in the background, steadily growing in volume until it’s near painful. Paige clutches her head and groans. She closes her eyes, but the light’s not going away. She clamps her hands over her ears as the whine drills into her head.

 

-

 

_She is older. She has paper white skin. She has ink seeping through every single pore. She is –_

-

_This is the first time she has walked among the puny mortals. She wonders exactly what is so interesting with them._

-

 

_She discovers the warmth of the sun and the soothing melody of the rain. She discovers the paintings flowers create. She sees humanity and its potential. She sees their inventions, their cleverness, their stupidity, their serendipity, their luck._

-

_She is forever._

 

-

_She is alone._

-

 

_She sees him._

-

 

“Paige!”

 

Paige’s eyes snap open and she looks up Tony, who is teetering on the edge of his bed, eyes wide as he stares at her.

 

Wait, how did he get so high?

 

The chair she was sitting on is turned over and she is on the floor, back pressed against the tiles and hair splayed out like a halo. She sits up and clutches her head again when the room spins.

 

“Are you okay?”

 

Paige peers up at him through the flickers of white and nods.

 

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

 

* * *

 

 

They don’t stop there. She gets home one night and suddenly curls in on herself at the dinner table when the whine hits back. It’s a surprise her ears aren’t bleeding and how the windows haven’t shattered. The others look at her worriedly, yelling her name, but she can’t hear them over the sound.

 

There’s the flash of light and an assault of images. The man who looks like an older Tony. The sight of the earth with its barely-formed civilizations. The first book. The first painting. An area that she somehow knows is Mesopotamia. The building of the pyramids. Marie Antoinette’s execution.

 

In the midst of these images, there are always slips of a different time, the one where she’s in a house together with the other-Tony. Sometimes, they talk. Most of the time, they insult each other. They tear each other apart and they are always put back together again to repeat it.

 

Other-Tony has a sword, it’s a little strange. She’s stranger. She can ram a pencil into someone’s body to stab a critical hit. That’s…inhuman. But then other-her and other-Tony don’t look human. They look –

 

“Paige, snap out of it!”

 

That was Harry. She opens her eyes and gasps for breath, noticing that the hands gripping her shoulders have enough strength to break her joints. Her mind flickers back to other-her before Harry snaps his fingers in front of her face, “Hey, focus, don’t leave us again.”

 

They don’t buy it when she says she had a headache, but thankfully don’t pry the subject any further.

 

The next episode has her dropping to her knees on the floor while she’s walking downstairs for breakfast. Images of the world before it reached to its current points. Castles, kings, queens, revolutions, evolutions, wars, blood, death –

 

Tony.

 

The high-pitched whine is being accompanied by a sixteen-part harmony in the background. Somehow, she knows that the song is saying something. It doesn’t have words but…she has a feeling she’s supposed to understand it. And then murmurs of low, guttural syllables spoken in harsh consonants and drawn out vowels, together with their rolling r’s. That is saying something too. But she can’t quite place it. Her brain tries to click the words (words?!) together and for a moment it sounds like ‘always and for –

 

Everything cuts out and she opens her eyes. She’s breathing hard.

 

Paige’s mind reels as she tries to piece everything together again, but to no avail. The images and words are slipping away from her like the details of a dream. But Tony was there. Tony was –

 

She schools her expression and stands up. They shouldn’t find her on the floor again.

 

It goes on like that, and with each flash of images, she remembers better, sees them clearer and the headaches lessen. She’s able to draw a line how the events are ordered, with help from accurate history books and that nagging voice inside her head.

 

The high-pitched whine sounds more like the murmurs, spoken loud and at the top of someone’s lungs. It doesn’t hurt as much anymore. But topped with the song and the guttural language, she still can’t make it out. But one thing stands out, ‘always and forever’.

 

It’s stands out because it’s not in English. It’s not any language on Earth. It’s the guttural murmur, but she understands that it means ‘always and forever’.

 

She takes to writing it all out, sometimes drawing. She writes down whatever syllables she can make out from the murmur. Whenever she can write down sentences, she tries to pronounce it, but it never sounds right. The others catch her whispering them under her breath and give her strange looks. She ignores them.

 

* * *

 

 

Tony’s on a feeding tube now. He can barely move and open his eyes, but from looking at the pinched look on his face, she can tell he feels like crap, although that probably goes unsaid. Cancer is shit. Actually, everything in the whole affair sucks. The cancer, the bills, her inconvenient vision-headaches, and the chemo. She knew that stuff was going to kill him, she should have gone with her instincts and threw it out the window, because it did a heel face turn and now Tony’s dying.

 

Nurses and doctors crowd him all the time, fussing over his temperature, his bowel movement, injecting drugs, taking out blood. It’s messy and annoying. They’re just making things worse for him. He wasn’t something to be prodded and poked at until the desired result came out, he could die.

 

He is going to.

 

Shut up.

 

Months of this and Tony’s not getting any better. In fact, looks like the useless immune system’s still in the dredges and he’s in far worse shape, because there’s the chemo, the cancer and hello another unnecessary cherry on top.

 

They won’t even let them see him because of the threat of infection. Paige digs her nails into the arm rest of the wooden chair when the whine-murmur starts up. She forcefully shoves it out of her mind, mentally yelling, “NOT NOW” as the doctor rambles on. Surprisingly, it obeys.

 

When it does return, it comes back full force. She doesn’t make it to bed in the night when she suddenly collapses on the floor, clutching her head, screaming.

 

It’s not flickers anymore, it’s a full out movie.

 

There’s other-Tony, no, Tony, when they first met. Yes, of course. She knows it, her lifeblood confirms it and her heart says _yes you’re right_ when she questions herself. She hates him, but she is not alone anymore. He hates her, but he’s not alone either. They watch the world turn to dust and ashes and rise like a phoenix. They argue, they yell, they kill and beat each other bloody.

 

The feeling of being horrified when they thought they’d slipped and killed each other.

 

The feeling of curiosity and relief at waking up.

 

And again. And again. A game.

 

Harry – Harry? Really, what were they – oh, oh. Students, of course. She was a teacher. No, more than that. But she taught; so did he. They’re all actually here. Harry, Manny, Robin. They don’t look any different than before, except Manny’s still a kid here.

 

Tearing apart. Screaming. Crying. Please please don’t do this – grinning, mercy, that’s nonexistent. A hand to the chest, the heave of a new first breath, the horrified look of being dragged back in the shark pit again.

 

Being stabbed with the sword and unable to wake up.

 

The memories stop to a blank and the background song and whine-murmur drops the volume.

 

The song stops fully and the murmurs whisper in her ear. It’s muddled, but she can make it out. Hell, she can understand it. There’s a light up ahead. She looks up and her body lurches forward as she’s sucked in.

 

The Voices boom, loud and clear:

 

~~AH LEH LAH AR~~ They’re standing in the middle of a stupid court. There are the boys, looking like they’re torn between what to do. Paige looks down and her hands are in chains inscribed with loops and circles. An ancient language, she knows. There’s a symbol under her feet. If she could only move –

 

~~FEE FALL ZOD DOH AH LEE EEM~~ Paige’s head snaps up. From the corner of her eye, so does Tony. The humans at the back of them are listening too. Can they even understand this? She barely even does, with her tangled, messed up memories.

 

~~AH EM MAH~~ Wait, did this even really happen?

 

~~ALCA NONCA~~ WAIT SHIT –

 

Paige opens her eyes, lungs burning and throat hurting from screaming.

 

Those motherfuckers –

 

Her phone rings. She gets to her feet and nearly falls down again when her knee buckles. Irritably, she picks it up from the dresser and jams her thumb to the call button.

 

“Paige, you have to get here as fast as you can – ” It’s Manny. Was he stranded at work or something? That stupid child. “It’s Tony. He’s…”

 

Paige throws her phone across the room and bolts out of the house, not minding that she’s in pajamas.

 

* * *

 

 

She nearly bashes the cab driver’s head in when he keeps on looking at the rearview mirror, eyebrows raising at her outfit, but she doesn’t, because getting to Tony is her top priority right now. She memorizes the plate number so she can gouge his eyes out later. Ignoring the stares from the patients and the staff, she races up to Tony’s room. Curse this hospital for having so many floors and for the elevators to be slow as snails.

 

She could tell him. She remembers now. If she tells him, he might remember too. He might be having the same visions as her, maybe that’s why he’s feeling so horrible from the cancer because the visions are taking their toll on him. If she tells him, he can confirm it. Maybe they’ll stop and leave him alone. He can get better.

 

The tiles are cold against her bare feet as she barrels down the hallway to Tony’s room. She can see its number. Finally, finally –

 

The others are there, along with the doctors and nurses. Paige stands in the doorway, gripping the doorframe for support. Human lungs are terribly inconvenient. Her blood is pounding in her ears, and it increases as she looks around the faces of the people inside the room for news of what has happened. Tony better be stabilized because she has something to tell him.

 

Manny turns to her first, then Robin and finally Harry.

 

Wipe that look off your face, she wants to say, but her chest hurts whenever she doesn’t focus on steadying her breath so she waits.

 

“Paige,” Harry starts.

 

She doesn’t like that look on his face.

 

It occurs to her that the ringing in her ears is actually the flatline of the heart monitor.

 

 


End file.
